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Ice storm help is more than just an obligation: Gallinger

If you allow a neighbour to plug into your generator during an outage, the connections made are more than just electrical.

The ice storm provided a chance for deeds above and beyond the bounds of obligation. When trees were downed on Mount Pleasant Rd., reducing traffic from two lanes in each direction to one lane, local resident Graham Hallward decided to pitch in with his hand saw. A few minutes later, Mark Hopson was passing by. Hopson, a wilderness guide, had a chainsaw in his truck and stopped to help. (Keith Beaty / Toronto Star file photo)

The recent ice storm dealt me a moral dilemma. Years ago my husband purchased an expensive generator capable of powering the entire house. When the storm hit, I asked what we would do if we were the only ones on our street with a generator. He said we could let our neighbours run an extension cord; that would be enough to run their furnace and keep them warm. These neighbours drive expensive cars and take yearly vacations so money is not an issue. They also ignore us when they pass on the street. Why should we just let them plug into our generator if the need arises again?

After the recent storm, there were smarmy articles in local media, blah-blahing about how natural disasters bring out the best in us. This is, apparently, not universally true.

The situation you describe is as old as biblical times. In the wonderful musical Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Webber and Rice raise the 3000+ year-old dilemma: what responsibility do those prepared for a crisis have to rescue those who didn’t bother? The question is even more difficult when the unprepared ones are snotty twits who don’t even say hello.

You had no obligation, as such, to help your neighbours in the scenario described. From the sound of things, these are people who have the resources needed to be ready for events such as this — they just didn’t get around to it. It would be interesting to know how many have installed generators since the storm, but I’m betting it’s not many. The world divides nicely into those who anticipate, plan and prepare, and those for whom each new day is a source of unanticipated wonder. The latter are unlikely to change now — after all, if the last storm was “surprising”, it would be flat-out astonishing for such a thing to happen twice!

Sounds vaguely like Pearson airport.

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But obligation is a tawdry, soul-sucking concept. What the storm provided was an opportunity for you, and other ready-for-anything types, to rise above obligation’s shabby confines and soar into the realm of generosity. Those with chainsaws cut trees off neighbours’ Lexuses. Those with snow tires pulled boneheads with summer rubber out of snowbanks. Those with propane in their barbecues hosted neighbourhood cookouts. Those with fully-charged cellphones made calls for those who were “just going to” charge theirs. And so on.

None of these things were done out of obligation — they were done with a generous spirit and a sense that, in times like these, we’re all in it together. And, ironically, that kind of generosity and sense of “belonging” creates communities.

For whatever reason, the neighbourhood in which you live is not a community as such — it’s merely a collection of houses. I suspect you all have too much money; in my experience, those are the postal codes in which folks tend to live the most isolated, and lonely, lives. Whatever the reason, I know this much — if, during that storm, you’d allowed your neighbour to plug into your generator, he wouldn’t ignore you anymore when he drove by. The connections made by such a gesture are, almost always, more than electrical.

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